04 February 2015

This is written by a childhood theater friend of mine who wishes to remain anonymous. The perspective is brilliant and I'm re-printing it here with their permission.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear Dr. Jenny McCarthy

Hello there,So I have for the last few years, read about things you have said about vaccines being responsible in part for your sons Autistic diagnosis. And I get that you have walked away from some of those things now that you have gotten basically "death threats". But now, since measles is back, and I’m sure other things are around the corner, I felt compelled to speak.My father got Polio one month after his 17th birthday. It was his senior year in High School. To give you an idea of what sort of life he was having, He was the President of the class, quarterback on the football team, a Yell leader, and was, as my uncles friend Butch once said, "The only kid on the block we knew who was destined for college." He was also one of the first eagle scouts in Contra Costa County. He woke up one morning with back pain and feverish. But he knew if he were not to show up for school he could not play in the football game that afternoon. So he went.

He didn't last long. He left school early and walked to the doctor’s office.There he was misdiagnosed with a slipped disc.They put him in traction. It was like clearing a road way for an Indy 500 car. The fever hit him hard, the virus took off, and he was out for about 4 days.When he woke up, he was in the polio ward at USFMC.For the three months he was in isolation he saw many things. Kids in iron lungs. Kids who were learning to re walk. Little children left to see their parents through long windows waving at them.He also saw, a newspaper roughly two weeks after he got the disease, stating, "SALK DISCOVERS POLIO VACCINE! TRIALS IN SCHOOLS COMING SOON."Can you imagine it?No you can't can you? Well maybe if you are older than 55. But if you are younger you can't. Cause you got a vaccine for Polio when you were a baby. And now you don't have it. And if you are lucky you don't know anyone with it.For a certain amount of time, he had to wear braces on both legs. From the hip. Once out of them, he swore he would never wear them again.His best friend in the world, a man who knew him before and for 60 years after, told me that while "Your dad was the same, He was different. Polio changed the colour in his eyes. He was mad as hell, and was not going to let it beat him."He went to college. He walked into the admissions office at Berkeley, and without a full senior year of any one subject, talked them into taking him. Tuition back then was 50 bucks a semester. Pretty amazing.He got married, and had four kids. When I was about 6 we were traveling and every once in a while, his legs would give out and he would fall. I remember him saying to my mother, " I think I need to get a cane. What if I pull one of the kids down with me and we are in a cross walk?" You see when we would walk with him, my dad would always put his hand on our shoulders, for balance. It was never a burden. For a man who needed very little, it was a nice thing to know we were helping him. He went to a store and got a cane. Over the years he bought many canes. Fancy ones... standard "need to go out into the garden and weed," ones.... ones made of gorgeous cherry stained wood... He amassed quite a collection.He has endured many injuries in his years walking. He broke his leg countless times. Polio leeches the muscles and bones of vitality. So breaking a bone ravaged by Polio is like snapping a green bean in half. I've watched him soak his feet and legs in Epsom salt, and once in a while get talked into wearing a brace on one leg. But never for long. He just couldn't tolerate it.He has seen specialist after specialist. Heard fatalistic statistics, and how he should be grateful he's alive. He has with great trepidation watched his children have hospital stays which have made him batty, as while also being our father, he has been a long term patient and it makes his skin crawl.It has defined him. He has a low tolerance for feeling sorry for yourself. If you didn't think you could do something, like I once had to wear a patch over my good eye to strengthen my bad one, something I rebelled fiercely against, he reminded me that I had too. No choice was given. That life sucks sometimes. But if I tried hard, like he had too when he got Polio, that I would make it. You can't beat a "Crippling disease," argument. Well, maybe my brother can, but that’s a whole other story in itself.Growing up with a father who had these issues, meant that there was no one to teach me how to swing a bat for softball. Or do a cartwheel. There was no impromptu dancing in our house. The frustration for him was palpable as he verbally tried his best to instruct us in various things. But reality is reality and on some level, I don't believe any of us are worse off. In fact, I think the man he became was better at a lot of things. We are champions of argument. We tend to not get emotional when advocating for ourselves or our loved ones. In fact we live knowing our hard attitudes about certain things make us difficult. But living with a man who had this happen to him, made us remember that not having fans in every town was not the end of the world. He taught us LIFE skills.For instance, my dad taught me that I could get through anything. You see, he's now in a wheel chair. A place he would never have wanted to be years ago. But he lost mobility due to a shoulder surgery he had to have. He couldn't walk, and couldn’t keep the last bits of strength he had to walk in play. I would have thought a wheel chair would have destroyed his spirit. But when he got into a motorized one and realized how advanced they were.... He got used to it. He never let it stop him. He watches over all of us like hawks. HE's controlling sometimes, but I know in some ways it’s because the heart break of losing all you know over a few days of your seventeenth year can make you hold very tight to that which you get back.Now of course there are many many other diseases we can become ill from. Pertussis, and mumps, and lots of others. The "Herd mentality" back then meant if you got Chicken Pox, so did every other kid in your house because your mother was going to get it all over at once. My siblings and I all had chicken pox at the same time. My oldest brother, had it everywhere. My youngest brother had a single pox mark on his butt. I was somewhere in the middle.I have had meningitis, and shingles, two illness's I would not wish on a living soul. Last week when the lad (my son,) went for his well child check-up he had to get a meningitis shot. When he balked saying, "What's the big deal?" I nearly smacked him over the head with a chair. Meningitis is no joke. I had the best form. Viral. 12 days in isolation with a 2 month recovery. My cousin Scott, whom I never knew, got it as a baby. Spinal. The most deadly. A "sick at 12, gone by 4" sort of thing.My father has been my example in all this. Because for as much as he has accomplished with Polio... he would not wish it on anyone. And if he could have avoided getting it he would have. Of course, he had no choice back then.And that’s really what we are talking about right? Choice. If you are against it for whatever reason, not only do you risk yours and your child’s life, but you risk mine as well because your strain...may be a new one. One that would never have come about if you hadn't made such a rich host with which to feed upon. And I don't give you permission to risk my life. Or that of my kid.Get a grip. You are on a pulpit. Of course it’s a pulpit of stupid people, but it’s a pulpit none the less. And those stupid people are running out, neglecting their duties as parents, and then hiding like cowering ashamed deer. Well you know what? Parts of being a parent are the hard choices you make. I have had to walk my kid through brain surgery. Believe me when I say if I had allowed myself a moment to let it sink in I wouldn't be here. If I had said "You don't have too," HE WOULDN'T BE HERE. It’s about making the hard choices and knowing that sometimes life is not fun, or easy.Your son clearly has come a long way since his initial diagnosis. When you spoke of him speaking at your wedding and how that was hard for him, I felt for you. Knowing that somewhere locked inside of our children, is all the things we take for granted is soul destroying. But not if you don't let it be. Not if you look it in the eye and tell it to FUCK RIGHT OFF. Your son will hopefully always know, as my father taught me, disabled does not mean un-abled.I wish you luck. and I wish for your son, everything he needs, and that EVERYONE gets their kids vaccinated.

It seemed
like such a good idea at the time: A merry-go-round hooked up to a water pump.
In rural sub-Saharan Africa, where children are plentiful but clean water is scarce,
the PlayPump harnessed one to provide the other. Every time the kids spun
around on the big colorful wheel, water filled an elevated tank a few yards
away, providing fresh, clean water anyone in the village could use all day.

PlayPump
International, the NGO that came up with the idea and developed the technology,
seemed to have thought of everything. To pay for maintenance, the elevated
water tanks sold advertising, becoming billboards for companies seeking access
to rural markets. If the ads didn’t sell, they would feature
HIV/AIDS-prevention campaigns. The whole package cost just $7,000 to install in
each village and could provide water for up to 2,500 people.

The
donations gushed in. In 2006, the U.S. government and two major foundations
pledged $16.4 million in a public ceremony emceed by Bill Clinton and Laura
Bush. The technology was touted by the World Bank and made a cameo in America’s
2007 Water for the Poor Act. Jay-Z personally pledged $400,000. PlayPump set
the goal of installing 4,000 pumps in Africa by 2010. “That would mean clean
drinking water for some ten million people,” a “Frontline” reporter announced.

International
Development Is Broken. Here Are Two Ways to Fix It.

By 2007,
less than two years after the grants came in, it was already clear these
aspirations weren’t going to be met. A UNICEF report found pumps abandoned,
broken, unmaintained. Of the more than 1,500 pumps that had been installed with
the initial burst of grant money in Zambia, one-quarter already needed repair.
The Guardian said the pumps were “reliant on child labour.”

PlayPumps
were going to harness the energy of children to provide fresh water to
sub-Saharan African villages. They didn't.

In 2010,
“Frontline” returned to the schools where they had filmed children laughing on
the merry-go-rounds, splashing each other with water. They discovered pumps
rusting, billboards unsold, women stooping to turn the wheel in pairs. Many of
the villages hadn’t even been asked if they wanted a PlayPump, they just got
one, sometimes replacing the handpumps they already had. In one community,
adults were paying children to operate the pump.

Let’s not
pretend to be surprised by any of this. The PlayPump story is a sort of Mad
Libs version of a narrative we’re all familiar with by now: Exciting new
development idea, huge impact in one location, influx of donor dollars, quick
expansion, failure.

I came
across the PlayPump story in Ken Stern’s With Charity For All, but I could have
plucked one from any of the dozen or so “development doesn’t work” best-sellers
to come out in the last ten years. In The Idealist—a kind of “where are they
now?” for the ideas laid out in Jeffrey Sachs’s The End of Poverty—Nina Munk
discovers African villages made squalid by the hopes and checkbooks of Western
do-gooders. Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee’s Poor Economics finds dozens of
“common sense” development projects—food aid, crop insurance,
microfinance—either don’t help poor people or may even make them poorer.

International
development is getting it from all sides. Governments and rich people (“major
donors” in NGO-ese) are embracing terms like “philanthrocapitalism,” “social
entrepreneurship,” and “impact bonds,” arguing that donations are investments,
not gifts. Australia and Canada have done away with their international
development agencies altogether, absorbing them into mega-ministries covering
foreign affairs and trade.

I am
conflicted about this moment. I have worked at international development NGOs
almost my entire career (primarily at two mid-sized human rights
organizations—one you’ve probably heard of and one you probably haven’t). I’ve
been frustrated by the same inefficiencies and assumptions of my sector that
are now getting picked apart in public. Like the authors, donors, and
governments attacking international development, I’m sometimes disillusioned
with what my job requires me to do, what it requires that I demand of others.

Over the
last year, I read every book, essay, and roman à clef about my field I could
find. I came out convinced that the problems with international development are
real, they are fundamental, and I might, in fact, be one of them. But I also
found that it’s too easy to blame the PlayPumps of the world. Donors, governments,
the public, the media, aid recipients themselves—they all contribute to the
dysfunction. Maybe the problem isn’t that international development doesn’t
work. It’s that it can’t.

In the late
’90s, Michael Kremer, then an economics professor at MIT, was in Kenya working
on an NGO project that distributed textbooks to schools in poor rural
districts. Around that time, the ratio of children to textbooks in Kenya was 17
to 1. The intervention seemed obvious: Poor villages need textbooks, rich donors
have the money to buy them. All we have to do is link them up.

But in the
early stages of the project, Kremer convinced the researchers to do it
differently. He wanted to know whether giving kids textbooks actually made them
better students. So instead of handing out books and making a simple
before-and-after comparison, he designed the project like a pharmaceutical
trial. He split the schools into groups, gave some of them the “treatment”
(i.e., textbooks) and the others nothing. Then he tested everyone, not just the
kids who got the books but also the kids who didn’t, to see if his intervention
had any effect.

It didn’t.
The trial took four years, but it was conclusive: Some of the kids improved
academically over that time and some got worse, but the treatment group wasn’t
any better off than the control.

Then Kremer
tried something else. Maybe the kids weren’t struggling in school because of
what was going on in the classroom, but because of what was going on outside of
it. So again, Kremer split the schools into groups and spent three years
testing and measuring them. This time, the treatment was an actual treatment—medication
to eradicate stomach worms. Worm infections affect up to 600 million children
around the world, sapping their nutrition and causing, among other things,
anemia, stomachaches, and stunting.

Once more,
the results were conclusive: The deworming pills made the kids noticeably
better off. Absence rates fell by 25 percent, the kids got taller, even their
friends and families got healthier. By interrupting the chain of infection, the
treatments had reduced worm infections in entire villages. Even more striking,
when they tested the same kids nearly a decade later, they had more education
and earned higher salaries. The female participants were less likely to be
employed in domestic services.

And compared
with Kremer’s first trial, deworming was a bargain. Textbooks cost $2 to $3
each. Deworming pills were as little as 49 cents. When Kremer calculated the
kids’ bump in lifetime wages compared with the cost of treatment, it was a
60-to-1 ratio.

This is
perfect TED Talk stuff: Conventional wisdom called into question, rigorous
science triumphing over dogma. As word of Kremer’s study spread, he became part
of a growing movement within international development to subject its
assumptions to randomized controlled trials.

Dozens of
books and articles (and yes, TED Talks) have tracked the rise of the
randomistas, as they’ve come to be called. The most prominent of these, and the
most fun to read, is Poor Economics, sort of the Principia Mathematica of
“obvious” development interventions tested and found wanting.

If someone
is chronically malnourished, to pick just one example, you should give them
some food, right? Duflo and Banerjee describe dozens of projects finding that,
when you subsidize or give away food to poor people, they don’t actually eat more.
Instead, they just replace boring foods with more interesting ones and remain,
in the statistics at least, “malnourished.”

In Udaipur,
India, a survey found that poor people had enough money to increase their food
spending by as much as 30 percent, but they chose to spend it on alcohol,
tobacco, and festivals instead. Duflo and Banerjee interviewed an out-of-work
Indonesian agricultural worker who had been under the food-poverty line for
years, but had a TV in his house.

You don’t
need a Ph.D. to understand the underlying dynamic here: Cheap food is boring.
In many developing countries, Duflo and Banerjee found that even the poorest
people could afford more than 2,000 calories of staple foods every day. But
given the choice between the fourth bowl of rice in one day and the first
cigarette, many people opt for the latter.

Even in
countries where development projects worked, where poor people went from hungry
to nourished, they weren’t more likely to get a job or make significantly more
money. All the appealing metaphors of NGO websites and
academo-best-sellers—“the poverty trap,” “the ladder of development”—go limp
under the magnifying glass of actually being tested.

Deworming
treatment had impressive results on education in Kenya—but programs elsewhere
aren't being as rigorously monitored.

Armed with
his rigorously gathered results, Kremer founded an NGO, Deworm the World. He
launched it at the 2007 World Economic Forum and committed to deworming ten
million children. He was feted by the Clinton Global Initiative;
GlaxoSmithKline, and Johnson & Johnson pledged $600 million worth of
deworming treatments a year, enough for every infected primary school student
in Africa. The World Health Organization issued a statement of support. Kenya
asked him to help create a national program to deworm 3.6 million children. Two
states in India initiated similar programs, aiming to treat millions more. The
organization now claims to have helped 40 million children in 27 countries.

But wait a
minute. Just because something works for 30,000 students in Kenya doesn’t mean
it will work for millions of them across Africa or India. Deworm the World’s
website talks a lot about its “evidence-based” approach. (It has now been
folded into an NGO called Evidence Action.) Yet the primary evidence that
deworming improves education outcomes is from Kremer’s single Kenya case and a
post-hoc analysis of deworming initiatives in the American South in 1910. In
2012, the organization said that it had treated 17 million children in India,
but didn’t report whether their attendance, school performance, or graduation
rates improved.

I keep
thinking I’m missing something really obvious, that I’m looking at the wrong
part of their website. So I call up Evidence Action and ask: Are you guys
really not testing how deworming affects education anymore?

“We don’t
measure the effects on school attendance and school performance,” says Alix
Zwane, Evidence Action’s executive director. At the scale they’re going for in
India, entire states at a time, splitting into control and treatment groups
simply wouldn’t be feasible.

Kremer tells
me that enough trials have been done to warrant the upscaling. “There’s more
evidence for this than the vast majority of things that governments spend money
on.” Every time you want to build a new road, you can’t stop to ask, Will this
one really help people get from place to place?

“Meanwhile,”
he says, “there’s a cohort of children that, if you don’t implement the policy
now, will go through years of schooling without treatment.”

It’s an
interesting question—when do you have enough evidence to stop testing each new
application of a development idea?—and I get that you can’t run a four-year
trial every time you roll out, say, the measles vaccine to a new country. But
like many other aid projects under pressure to scale up too fast and too far,
deworming kids to improve their education outcomes isn’t the slam-dunk its
supporters make it out to be.

In 2000, the
British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a literature review of 30 randomized
control trials of deworming projects in 17 countries. While some of them showed
modest gains in weight and height, none of them showed any effect on school
attendance or cognitive performance. After criticism of the review by the World
Bank and others, the BMJ ran it again in 2009 with stricter inclusion criteria.
But the results didn’t change. Another review, in 2012, found the same thing:
“We do not know if these programmes have an effect on weight, height, school
attendance, or school performance.”

Kremer and
Evidence Action dispute the way these reviews were carried out, and sent me an
upcoming study from Uganda that found links between deworming and improved test
scores. But the evidence they cite on their own website undermines this data.
Kremer’s 2004 study reporting the results of the original deworming trial
notes—in the abstract!—that “we do not find evidence that deworming improves
academic test scores,” only attendance. Another literature review cited on
Deworm the World’s website says, “When infected children are given deworming
treatment, immediate educational and cognitive benefits are not always
apparent.”

Then there’s
the comparison to textbooks. Kenya, it turns out, is a uniquely terrible place
to hand out textbooks to kids and expect better academic performance. When
Kremer reported that textbooks had no overall effect, he also noted that they
did actually improve test scores for the kids who were already at the top of
the class. The main problem, it seems, was that the textbooks were in English,
the second or third language for most of the kids. Of the third-graders given
textbooks, only 15 percent could even read them.

In the 1980s
and early ’90s, a series of meta-analyses found that textbooks were actually
effective at improving school performance in places where the language issues
weren’t as complex. In his own paper reporting the Kenya results, Kremer noted
that, in Nicaragua and the Philippines, giving kids textbooks did improve their
test scores.

But the
point of all this is not to talk shit on Kremer—who has bettered the world more
with his career than I ever have with mine—or to dismantle his deworming
charity, or to advocate that we should all go back to giving out free
textbooks. What I want to talk shit on is the paradigm of the Big Idea—that
once we identify the correct one, we can simply unfurl it on the entire
developing world like a picnic blanket.

There are
villages where deworming will be the most meaningful education project
possible. There are others where free textbooks will. In other places, it will
be new school buildings, more teachers, lower fees, better transport, tutors,
uniforms. There’s probably a village out there where a PlayPump would beat all
these approaches combined. The point is, we don’t know what works, where, or
why. The only way to find out is to test these models—not just before their
initial success but afterward, and constantly.

I can see
why it’s appealing to think that, once you find a successful formula for
development, you can just scale it up like a Model T. Host governments want
programs that get more effective as they get bigger. Individual donors, you and
me, we want to feel like we’re backing a plucky little start-up that is going
to save the world. No international institution wants to say in their annual
report: “There’s this great NGO that increased attendance in a Kenyan school
district. We’re giving them a modest sum to do the same thing in one other
district in one other country.”

The repeated
“success, scale, fail” experience of the last 20 years of development practice
suggests something super boring: Development projects thrive or tank according
to the specific dynamics of the place in which they’re applied. It’s not that
you test something in one place, then scale it up to 50. It’s that you test it
in one place, then test it in another, then another. No one will ever be
invited to explain that in a TED talk.

The last NGO
I worked for had 150 employees and a budget of more than $25 million. Employees
were divided into “program staff” (the people researching, coordinating, and
implementing our mission) and “overhead staff” (the fund-raising, human
resources, and accounting departments helping them do it). Like most NGOs, we
bragged to our donors that we had low overhead, that their dollars and euros
and kroner and francs went to “the cause” and not to our rent or our heating
bills. And this was, at least on the Excel sheets, true. Most of our money went
to researcher and project manager salaries. The fund-raising, H.R., and
accounting departments could have each fit comfortably in a minivan.

The problem
is, those overhead tasks don’t disappear just because you don’t spend money on
them. Someone has to monitor the accounts, find new donors, calculate taxes,
organize the holiday party. Centralizing these tasks in dedicated departments,
hiring specialists, getting good at them, that would have looked like
bureaucracy. So instead, we spun them out to the entire staff: We assigned
researchers and project managers—anthropology majors mostly, some law school
dropouts—to do our H.R., accounting, fund-raising, and project evaluations.

The outcome
was as chaotic as it sounds. Want to hire someone? You’ll need to write your
own job ad, find job boards to post it to, and, in some cases, update the
standard employment contract yourself. Want to issue a press release about the
results of the study you just performed? Write it yourself and start sending it
to journalists. Hopefully you know a few.

The
downsides of this approach were most obvious in fund-raising. If there’s one
thing donors hate, it’s paying us to find more donors. So every program staffer
was responsible for raising (and accounting, and monitoring, and reporting)
funds for their own projects. Staff members spent days doing the same donor
research (“which foundations fund work on water scarcity?”) that a colleague
across the hall did last week. Without a centralized staff to coordinate
pitches, we contacted the same donors dozens of times with small-fry requests
rather than combining them into one coherent “ask.” (One employee, legend had
it, asked Google if they could Google Translate our website as an in-kind
donation.)

No one had
any expertise in writing grant proposals, conducting impact assessments, or
managing high-maintenance funders like the European Commission—training courses
would have counted as overhead spending. We missed opportunities for new
funding, we bungled contracts we already had, and we turned donors against us.
Every staff meeting, one or two people announced they were leaving. “I wasn’t
hired to spend my day fund-raising” were the most common eight words at
farewell parties.

My
experience wasn’t unique. Stern cites the example of the American Red Cross,
which sent confused volunteers, clueless employees, and, bafflingly, perishable
Danish pastries to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina because it hadn’t
invested in training its U.S. staff in actual crisis response. A buddy of mine
works at an NGO with 150 staff where the H.R. department is exactly one person,
and she’s also the receptionist.

It’s
understandable that donors are paranoid about overhead. The last few years have
seen charity after charity busted for blowing donations on corporate junkets,
billboard advertising, and outright fraud. Some breast cancer charities pay
telemarketing companies 90 cents of each dollar they raise just to raise it.
Greg Mortenson, he of the Three Cups of Tea school-building empire, had to pay
$1 million back to his own charity when a Jon Krakauer exposé revealed that he
was spending donations on a never-ending book tour and pocketing the proceeds.

Dan
Pallotta, who spent the ’90s and 2000s running a $300 million breast cancer and
AIDS charity, has produced two books arguing that this obsession with overhead
keeps charities from reaching the scale required to take on large problems. Pallotta
uses the example of two soup kitchens: One spends 60 cents of every donation
dollar on “programs” (i.e., soup), while the other spends 90 cents.

According to
the conventional wisdom of donors and charity rating agencies, your donation is
better spent on the organization where only 10 percent of spending goes to
overhead. But using this one number ignores much more important indicators of
the charity’s impact. Is the soup nutritious and warm? Is it getting to the
right people? Does the kitchen open on time every day and have kind,
professional staff? And, hang on, do free warm meals even help people escape
poverty? Providing decent service, targeting handouts, testing these
assumptions—these things cost money, whether donors like it or not.

So charities
hide overhead, like we did, in overburdened program staff, untrained
volunteers, and external consultants. Just as deworming millions of children is
different in kind, not degree, from deworming a village of them, running a
large, professional charity is completely different from running a new,
start-uppy one. Small-scale projects (installing one PlayPump, say) can keep
their overhead low through charismatic leaders, passionate staff, and
long-standing relationships with the communities they’re seeking to assist.
Large-scale projects require stuff like budget managers, reporting frameworks,
light bulbs, and, yes, a goddamn holiday party.

Pallotta’s
Uncharitable has a nice example of what this looks like. His first
cross-country AIDS ride had 39 cyclists and almost zero overhead. The group was
small enough to sleep in gymnasiums, to rely on churches and good samaritans to
provide food and hot showers. If supplies fell short, they could knock on doors
asking for help or, in a pinch, put up their tents in backyards. He raised
$80,000.

By the
2000s, the rides were attracting an average of 3,000 riders. A group that size
requires a logarithmic increase in organization and support—renting out whole
campgrounds, professional catering, dedicated medical and legal staff. Overhead
costs ballooned to 42 percent of each donation. But each ride raised $7
million.

As with the
actual aid projects themselves, the success of a charity depends on specifics,
not a single, one-size-fits-all indicator. Charities do all kinds of
stuff—conduct research, train local NGOs, build infrastructure, give away
goats. For donors to truly determine how well they’re doing it, they’d need to
come up with a customized report card for each charity.

For a soup
kitchen, it would be the stuff I just mentioned: Do they open on time? How’s
their soup? For an NGO that, say, monitors government infrastructure projects
for corruption, it would be things like, What percentage of projects are they
assessing? Are their assessments yielding correct information? Is this
information being communicated to the communities affected by corruption?

Judging
charities like this, on the impacts of their work and whether they’re
addressing the problem they set out to solve, yields qualitative information,
sentences, and observations that can’t be compared across charities. Given the
millions of international development NGOs with their upside-down hats out (the
IRS, Stern notes, approves 99.5 percent of charity applications), it’s faster
and easier to measure them all by the same standard.

This is why
donors love overhead. It’s one number that allows you to compare the soup
kitchen with the anti-corruption think tank. It smells all rigorous and
objective, but it doesn’t require any actual work. Charities provide their own
overhead figures, after all, just like they write their own annual reports and
produce their own little Kony 2012 fund-raising videos. International
development NGOs aren’t always obligated to issue audited accounts. Some of
them report no overhead at all, the institutional equivalent of “I didn’t
inhale.”

I’m not
going to propose a cute little solution here to make this easier for donors, or
suggest some “right” overhead percentage. For most charities, 10 percent
overhead probably isn’t enough, and 90 percent is just fucking around. But the
whole point is that we shouldn’t pick just one number to stand in for
efficiency. We’re always arguing that, if rich countries want to solve the
problems of poor ones, they’re going to have to spend time getting to know
them. It’s time we apply the same logic to the agencies we dispatch to do the
job.

Dertu isn’t
a place very many people go on purpose. Located in northeastern Kenya, close to
the Somali border, and next door to a sprawling refugee camp, in 2004 it was
little more than a rest stop, a place for the local pastoralists to refresh
their animals and catch up on local news. Its chief attraction was fresh water
from a UNICEF-drilled borehole in the clay. Of the few thousand people living
there permanently, more than 80 percent relied on food aid. Ninety percent were
illiterate.

This is the
“before” picture of Dertu that Jeffrey Sachs found when he initiated his
Millennium Villages Project there in 2006. Sachs, a professor at Columbia
University, became a Bono-approved development celebrity with his book The End
of Poverty, a screed against the rich world’s complacency in letting easily
solvable problems—malaria, literacy, clean water—damn an entire continent to
misery.

Sachs’s book
tour culminated in the establishment of the Millennium Villages Project, an
ambitious plan to jump-start development with a huge influx of cash, in-kind
support, and infrastructure to some of the poorest settlements in the world.
Sachs’s premise was that millions of people, dozens of countries, had fallen
into the “poverty trap”: Living in substandard housing leads to problems
concentrating at school. Which leads to not graduating. Which leads to working
in low-skilled jobs. Which leads to living in substandard housing. And on and
on.

The only
solution, Sachs argued, was to dramatically boost people to a level where they
could start to develop themselves.

This is, it
turns out, an incredibly persuasive idea, and in the two years after the book
came out, Sachs raised $120 million (including $50 million from George Soros’s
personal checkbook) and identified 14 villages throughout sub-Saharan Africa to
test his theory.

As described
in Nina Munk’s The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty, things
looked promising in Dertu at first. Sachs convinced GE and Ericsson to donate
medical equipment and cell phones. He hired local managers who knew the culture
and language to ensure his project was responding to Dertu’s needs. His teams
built housing, schools, roads, health clinics. They set up a livestock market
to attract farmers from all over the region.

But soon,
the momentum faltered. Without electricity to run it or specialists to maintain
it, the advanced medical equipment gathered dust—in Kenya, that means
literally. The managers of the project, so knowledgeable about the local
culture and mores, eventually succumbed to them, doling out benefits on the
basis of tribal favoritism and tit-for-tat back-scratching. The borehole broke
down and water had to be shipped in by truck.

The core of
the problem, as Munk describes it, was that Dertu became a sort of company
town, with the Millennium Villages Project providing the only reliable source
of employment, benefits, and public services. Thousands of new residents came
from the nearby refugee camp and other parts of Kenya, seeking jobs or
handouts. Where Dertu was once a stopover for nomads, the influx of donor
money, the improved infrastructure, the free housing and education and health
care, had given people a reason to stay. Sachs’s funding couldn’t keep up. And
eventually, it ran out.

In an
interview about her book for EconTalk, Munk describes what Dertu looked like
the last time she saw it, in 2011:

They were
now really living in a kind of squalor that I hadn’t seen on my first visit.
Their huts were jammed together; they were patched with those horrible polyurethane
bags that one sees all over Africa. ... There were streams of slop that were
going down between these tightly packed huts. And the latrines had overflowed
or were clogged. And no one was able to agree on whose job it was to maintain
them. And there were ditches piled high with garbage. And it was just—it made
my heart just sink.

This is the
paradox: When you improve something, you change it in ways you couldn’t have
expected. You can find examples of this in every corner of development
practice. A project in Kenya that gave kids free uniforms, textbooks, and
classroom materials increased enrollment by 50 percent, swamping the teachers
and reducing the quality of education for everyone. Communities in India cut
off their own water supply so they could be classified as “slums” and be
eligible for slum-upgrading funding. I’ve worked in places where as soon as a
company sets up a health clinic or an education program, the local government
disappears—why should they spend money on primary schools when a rich company
is ready to take on the responsibility?

There’s
nothing avaricious about this. If anything, it demonstrates the entrepreneurial
spirit we’re constantly telling the poor they need to demonstrate.

My favorite
example of unintended consequences comes, weirdly enough, from the United
States. In a speech to a criminology conference, Nancy G. Guerra, the director
of the Institute for Global Studies at the University of Delaware, described a
project where she held workshops with inner-city Latina teenagers, trying to
prevent them from joining gangs. The program worked in that none of the girls
committed any violence within six months of the workshops. But by the end of
that time, they were all, each and every one, pregnant.

“That
behavior was serving a need for them,” she says in her speech. “It made them
feel powerful, it made them feel important, it gave them a sense of identity.
... When that ended, [they] needed another kind of meaning in their lives.”

The fancy
academic term for this is “complex adaptive systems.” We all understand that
every ecosystem, each forest floor or coral reef, is the result of millions of
interactions between its constituent parts, a balance of all the aggregated
adaptations of plants and animals to their climate and each other. Adding a
non-native species, or removing one that has always been there, changes these
relationships in ways that are too intertwined and complicated to predict.

According to
Ben Ramalingam’s Aid on the Edge of Chaos, international development is just
such an invasive species. Why Dertu doesn’t have a vaccination clinic, why
Kenyan schoolkids can’t read, it’s a combination of culture, politics, history,
laws, infrastructure, individuals—all of a society’s component parts, their
harmony and their discord, working as one organism. Introducing something
foreign into that system—millions in donor cash, dozens of trained personnel
and equipment, U.N. Land Rovers—causes it to adapt in ways you can’t predict.

A friend of
mine works at an NGO that audits factories in India and China, inspecting them
for child labor, forced labor, human-trafficking, everything celebrities are
always warning us about. I asked him if, after ten years of inspections,
conditions have gotten any better. “Yes and no,” he said. “Anytime you set a
standard, some companies will become sophisticated to meet it, and others will
become sophisticated to avoid it.”

So
international development sucks, right? I’ve just spent thousands of words
telling you all the ways the incentives of donors, recipients, and NGOs
contradict each other. Why not just scrap it altogether?

Because I
don’t think that’s the conclusion these examples suggest. I think they suggest
something much less dramatic: It’s not that development is broken, it’s that
our expectations of it are.

First, let’s
de-room this elephant: Development has happened. The last 50 years have seen
about the biggest explosion of prosperity in human history. China, India,
Taiwan, South Korea, Turkey, Mexico—these aren’t the only countries where you’d
rather be born now than 50 years ago. Even the poorest countries in the
world—Burundi, Somalia, Zimbabwe—are doing way better on stuff like
vaccinations and literacy than they did earlier in our own lifetimes.

You
sometimes hear this Cambrian proliferation of well-being as an argument against
development aid, like: “See? China got better all by itself.” But the rise of
formerly destitute countries into the sweaters-and-smartphones bracket is less
a refutation of the impact of development aid than a reality-check of its
scale. In 2013, development aid from all the rich countries combined was $134.8
billion, or about $112 per year for each of the world’s 1.2 billion people
living on less than $1.25 per day. Did we really expect an extra hundred bucks
a year to pull anyone, much less a billion of them, out of poverty?

Development,
no matter how it happens, is a slow process. It wasn’t until about 30 years
after Mao’s death that China’s per capita GDP reached lower-middle-income
status. The country’s growth is arguably the fastest of any country’s since we,
as a species, started gathering economic statistics. Even in the most
cartoonishly successful scenario imaginable, countries like the Central African
Republic (per capita GDP: $700, adjusted for purchasing power), Burundi ($600),
and the Democratic Republic of Congo ($400) will take decades just to reach the
point where China is now.

The ability
of international development projects to speed up this process is limited.
Remember how I said the deworming project had a 60-to-1 ratio between the price
of the pills and the increase in wages for the kids who got them? The increase
was $30. Not $30 per year. The kids earned $30 more over their lifetimes as a
result of the deworming treatment. You find this a lot in the development
literature: Even the most wildly successful projects decrease maternal
mortality by a few percent here, add an extra year or two of life expectancy
there.

This isn’t a
criticism of the projects themselves. This is how social policy works, in baby
steps and trial-and-error and tweaks, not in game changers. Leave the leaps and
bounds to computing power. If a 49-cent deworming treatment really does produce
a $30 increase in wages for some of the poorest people on Earth, we are
assholes for not spending it.

And this is
where I landed after a year of absorbing dozens of books and articles and
speeches about international development: The arguments against it are myriad,
and mostly logistical and technical. The argument for it is singular, moral,
and, to me anyway, utterly convincing: We have so much, they have so little.

If we really
want to fix development, we need to stop chasing after ideas the way we go on
fad diets. Successful programs should be allowed to expand by degrees, not
digits (direct cash payments, which have shown impressive results in Kenya and
Uganda, are a great candidate for the kind of deliberate expansion I’m talking
about). NGOs need to be free to invest in the kinds of systems and processes
we’re always telling developing countries to put in place. And rich countries
need to spend less time debating how to divide up the tiny sliver of our GDP we
spend on development and more time figuring out how to leverage our vast
economic and political power to let it happen on its own.

As Owen
Barder, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development (from whom I stole
many of the ideas in this essay), puts it:

If we
believe that trade is important, we could do more to open our own markets to
trade from developing countries. If we believe property rights are important,
we could do more to enforce the principle that nations, not illegitimate
leaders, own their own natural resources. ... If we believe transparency is
important, we could start by requiring our own companies to publish the details
of the payments they make to developing countries.

PlayPump
International, the charity I started with, doesn’t exist anymore. The pumps,
however, are still being installed by Roundabout Water Solutions, an NGO that
markets them as a “niche solution” that should only be installed at primary
schools in poor rural areas. Four years ago, the same evaluations that so
harshly criticized the rapid expansion of the project also acknowledged that,
in some villages, under the right circumstances, they were fabulously helpful.

In 2010,
“Frontline” interviewed the director of PlayPump about its failures, and he
said, “It might have been a bit ambitious, but hey, you gotta dream big.
Everyone’s always said it’s such a great idea.”

And it was.
But maybe when the next great idea comes along, we should all dream a little
smaller.

Michael
Hobbes is a human rights consultant in Berlin who writes regularly for The New
Republic.

13 October 2014

I'm not going to write directly about my experiences in scientology because frankly other people have done a better job of it and my experiences were rather tame in comparison to most people I know. Some of it was actually downright enjoyable, and yah I'm going to catch flack from those who UBER-hate scientology for saying that but I refuse to lie about it because I'm learning about living my truth. This isn't to say that I believe in scientology, or that I think it's an ethical organization - news flash it's a cult and those aren't usually ethical even when they try to be. I just don't want to waste time when you can be reading/watching something which explains it better.

However I will be using my experiences as fodder for my fiction - that's another thing entirely because just about ALL writers use their real lives or pasts or friend's & family's lives/pasts as jumping points into creating literature. Also because of {redacted's} policy they can't declare you for critiquing or commenting in something via Art - it's Right THERE in their Art Series so there's that. I mean not that I care much if they do that at this point, hell it might actually INCREASE sales of whatever it is I'm trying to hawk at that moment in time.

The thing is to be 110% honest I'm trying to draw more universal themes because they aren't the only people/groups/religions/philosophy making those same idiotic mistakes. As someone who's studying to become an Anthropologist that's what I'd rather be exploring, the larger ramifications of such idiocy and how even intelligent people get to the point of believing such nonsense.

What I am going to do in the here and now is compile some stuff that I feel covers the topic well and preferably with some humour. We can ALL use more laughs in our life.

Starting with his family ...

Dark, YES, Funny, Yes, Absolutely bloody true? YES YES and more YES!

The second thing you should check out if you haven't is zir's book {A Queer and Pleasant Danger} then you need to, funny, edgy and covers everything about the early days of the Sea Org. Zir's blog is here. Kate is just a wonderful and quirky human being and someone I admire and has even been supportive during my transition into descientologizing myself and discovering my true self.

#3 ... Another great book, and especially for me because his experiences often mirror mine is Blown for Good: Behind the Iron Curtain of Scientology. When I knew Marc I thought he was a pompous ... I still think he's a .......... but DAMN this book is accurate and funny despite all of that. He also seems to be less of that so fatherhood and descientologizing seem to suit him :)

Multiple Levels of DominationResisting the Matrix of DominationBlack Women as Agents of KnowledgeSituated Knowledge, Subjugated Knowledge, and Partial PerspectivesDialogue and Empathy

Black feminist thought demonstrates Black women's emerging power as agents of knowledge. By portraying African-American women as self-defined, selt-reliant individuals confronting race, gender, and class oppression, Afrocentric feminist thought speaks to the importance that oppression, Afrocentric feminist thought speaks to the importance that knowledge plays in empowering oppressed people. One distinguishing feature of Black feminist thought is its insistence that both the changed consciousness of individuals and the social transformation of political and economic institutions constitute essential ingredients for social change. New knowledge is important for both dimensions of change.

Knowledge is a vitally important part of the social relations of domination and resistance. By objectifying African-American women and recasting our experiences to serve the interests of elite white men, much of the Eurocentric masculinist worldview fosters Black women's subordination. But placing Black women's experiences at the center of analysis offers fresh insights on the prevailing concepts, paradigms, and epistemologies of this worldview and on its feminist and Afrocentric critiques. Viewing the world through a both/and conceptual lens of the simultaneity of race, class, and gender oppression and of the need for a humanist vision of community creates new possibilities for an empowering Afrocentric feminist knowledge. Many Black feminist intellectuals have long thought about the world in this way because this is the way we experience the world.

Afrocentric feminist thought offers two significant contributions toward turthering our understanding of the important connections among knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. First, Black feminist thought fosters a fundamental paradigmatic shift in how we think about oppression. By embracing a paradigm of race, class, and gender as interlocking systems of oppression, Black feminist thought reconceptualizes the social relations of dommation and resistance. Second, Black feminist thought addresses ongoing epistemological debates in feminist theory and in the sociology of knowledge concerning ways of assessing "truth." Offering subordinate groups new knowledge about their own experiences can be empowering. But revealing new ways of knowing that allow subordinate groups to define their own reality has far greater implications.

"What I really feel is radical is trying to make coalitions with people who are different from you," maintains Barbara Smith. "I feel it is radical to be dealing with race and sex and class and sexual identity all at one time. I think that is really radical because it has never been done before." Black feminist thought fosters a fundamental paradigmatic shift that rejects additive approaches to oppression. Instead of starting with gender and then adding in other variables such as age, sexual orientation, race, social class, and religion, Black feminist thought sees these distinctive systems of oppression as bemg part of one overarching structure of domination. Viewing relations of domination for Black women for any given sociohistorical context as being structured via a system of interlocking race, class, and gender oppression expands the focus of analysis from merely describing the similarities and differences distinguishing these systems of oppression and focuses greater attention on how they interconnect. Assummg that each system needs the others in order to function creates a distinct theoretical stance that stimulates the rethinking of basic social science concepts.

Afrocentric feminist notions of family reflect this reconceptualization process. Black women's experiences as bloodmothers, othermothers, and community othermothers reveal that the mythical norm of a heterosexual, married couple, nuclear family with a nonworking spouse and a husband earning a "family wage" is far from being natural, universal and preferred but instead is deeply embedded in specific race and class formations. Placmg African-American women in the center of analysis not only reveals much-needed information about Black women's experiences but also questions Eurocentric masculinist perspectives on family

Black women's experiences and the Afrocentric feminist thought rearticulating them also challenge prevailing definitions of community. Black women's actions in the struggle or group survival suggest a vision of community that stands in opposition to that extant in the dominant culture. The definition of community implicit in the market model sees community as arbitrary and fragile, structured fundamentally by competition and domination. In contrast, Afrocentric models of community stress connections, caring, and personal accountability. As cultural workers African-American women have rejected the generalized ideology of domination advanced by the dominant group in order to conserve Afrocentric conceptualizations of community. Denied access to the podium, Black women have been unable to spend time theorizing about alternative conceptualizations of community. Instead, through daily actions African-American women have created alternative communities that empower.

This vision of community sustained by African-American women in conjunction with African-American men addresses the larger issue of reconceptualizing power. The type of Black women's power discussed here does resemble feminist theories of power which emphasize energy and community. However, in contrast to this body of literature whose celebration of women's power is often accompanied by a lack of attention to the importance of power as domination, Black women's experiences as mothers, community othermothers, educators, church leaders, labor union center-women, and community leaders seem to suggest that power as energy can be fostered by creative acts of resistance.

The spheres of influence created and sustained by African-American women are not meant solely to provide a respite from oppressive situations or a retreat from their effects. Rather, these Black female spheres of influence constitute potential sanctuaries where individual Black women and men are nurtured in order to confront oppressive social institutions. Power from this perspective is a creative power used for the good of the community, whether that community is conceptualized as one's family, church community, or the next generation of the community's children. By making the community stronger, Atrican-American women become empowered, and that same community can serve as a source of support when Black women encounter race, gender, and class oppression. . . .

Approaches that assume that race, gender, and class are interconnected have immediate practical applications. For example, African-American women continue to be inadequately protected by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The primary purpose of the statute is to eradicate all aspects of discrimination. But judicial treatment of Black women's employment discrimination claims has encouraged Black women to identify race or sex as the so-called primary discrimination. "To resolve the inequities that confront Black women," counsels Scarborough, the courts must first correctly conceptualize them as 'Black women,' a distinct class protected by Title VII." Such a shift, from protected categories to protected classes of people whose Title VII claims might be based on more than two discriminations, would work to alter the entire basis of current antidiscrimination efforts.

Reconceptualizing phenomena such as the rapid growth of female-headed households in African-American communities would also benefit from a race-, class-, and gender-inclusive analysis. Case studies of Black women heading households must be attentive to racially segmented local labor markets and community patterns, to changes in local political economies specific to a given city or region, and to established racial and gender ideology for a given location. This approach would go far to deconstruct Eurocentric, masculinist analyses that implicitly rely on controlling images of the matriarch or the welfare mother as guiding conceptual premises. . . . Black feminist thought that rearticulates experiences such as these fosters an enhanced theoretical understanding of how race, gender, and class oppression are part of a single, historically created system.

Additive models of oppression are firmly rooted in the either/or dichotomous thinking of Eurocentric, masculinist thought. One must be either Black or white in such thought systems--persons of ambiguous racial and ethnic identity constantly battle with questions such as "what are your, anyway?" This emphasis on quantification and categorization occurs in conjunction with the belief that either/or categories must be ranked. The search for certainty of this sort requires that one side of a dichotomy be privileged while its other is denigrated. Privilege becomes defined in relation to its other.

Replacing additive models of oppression with interlocking ones creates possibilities for new paradigms. The significance of seeing race, class, and gender as interlocking systems of oppression is that such an approach fosters a paradigmatic shift of thinking inclusively about other oppressions, such as age, sexual orientation, religion, and ethnicity. Race, class, and gender represent the three systems of oppression that most heavily affect African-American women. But these systems and the economic, political, and ideological conditions that support them may not be the most fundamental oppressions, and they certainly affect many more groups than Black women. Other people of color, Jews, the poor white women, and gays and lesbians have all had similar ideological justifications offered for their subordination. All categories of humans labeled Others have been equated to one another, to animals, and to nature.

Placing African-American women and other excluded groups in the center of analysis opens up possibilities for a both/and conceptual stance, one in which all groups possess varying amounts of penalty and privilege in one historically created system. In this system, for example, white women are penalized by their gender but privileged by their race. Depending on the context, an individual may be an oppressor, a member of an oppressed group, or simultaneously oppressor and oppressed.

Adhering to a both/and conceptual stance does not mean that race, class, and gender oppression are interchangeable. For example, whereas race, class, and gender oppression operate on the social structural level of institutions, gender oppression seems better able to annex the basic power of the erotic and intrude in personal relationships via family dynamics and within individual consciousness. This may be because racial oppression has fostered historically concrete communities among African-Americans and other racial/ethnic groups. These communities have stimulated cultures of resistance. While these communities segregate Blacks from whites, they simultaneously provide counter-institutional buffers that subordinate groups such as African-Americans use to resist the ideas and institutions of dominant groups. Social class may be similarly structured. Traditionally conceptualized as a relationship of individual employees to their employers, social class might be better viewed as a relationship of communities to capitalist political economies. Moreover, significant overlap exists between racial and social class oppression when viewing them through the collective lens of family and community. Existing community structures provide a primary line of resistance against racial and class oppression. But because gender cross-cuts these structures, it finds fewer comparable institutional bases to foster resistance.

Embracing a both/and conceptual stance moves us from additive, separate systems approaches to oppression and toward what I now see as the more fundamental issue of the social relations of domination. Race, class, and gender constitute axes of oppression that characterize Black women's experiences within a more generalized matrix of domination. Other groups may encounter different dimensions of the matrix, such as sexual orientation, religion, and age, but the overarching relationship is one of domination and the types of activism it generates.

Bell Hooks labels this matrix a "politic of domination" and describes how it operates along interlocking axes of race, class, and gender oppression. This politic of domination

refers to the ideological ground that they share, which is a belief in domination, and a belief in the notions of superior and inferior, which are components of all of those systems. For me it's like a house, they share the foundation, but the foundation is the ideological beliefs around which notions of domination are constructed.

Johnella Butler claims that new methodologies growing from this new paradigm would be "non-hierarchical" and would "refuse primacy to either race, class, gender, or ethnicity, demanding instead a recognition of their matrix-like interaction." Race, class, and gender may not be the most fundamental or important systems of oppression, but they have most profoundly affected African-American women. One significant dimension of Black feminist thought is its potential to reveal insights about the social relations of domination organized along other axes such as religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age. Investigating Black women's particular experiences thus promises to reveal much about the more universal process of domination.

In addition to being structured along axes such as race, gender, and social class, the matrix of domination is structured on several levels. People experience and resist oppression on three levels: the level of personal biography; the group or community level of the cultural context created by race, class, and gender; and the systemic level of social institutions. Black feminist thought emphasizes all three levels as sites of domination and as potential sites of resistance.

Each individual has a unique personal biography made up of concrete experiences, values, motivations, and emotions. No two individuals occupy the same social space; thus no two biographies are identical. Human ties can be freeing and empowering, as is the case with Black women's heterosexual love relationships or in the power of motherhood in African-American families and communities. Human ties can also be confining and oppressive. Situations of domestic violence and abuse or cases in which controlling images foster Black women's internalized oppression represent domination on the personal level. The same situation can look quite different depending on the consciousness one brings to interpret it.

This level of individual consciousness is a fundamental area where new knowledge can generate change. Traditional accounts assume that power as domination operates from the top down by forcing and controlling unwilling victims to bend to the will of more powerful superiors. But these accounts fail to account for questions concerning why, for example, women stay with abusive men even with ample opportunity to leave or why slaves did not kill their owners more often. The willingness of the victim to collude in her or his own victimization becomes lost. They also fail to account for sustained resistance by victims, even when chances for victory appear remote. By emphasizing the power of self-definition and the necessity of a free mind, Black feminist thought speaks to the importance African-American women thinkers place on consciousness as a sphere of freedom. Black women intellectuals realize that domination operates not only by structuring power from the top down but by simultaneously annexing the power as energy of those on the bottom for its own ends. In their efforts to rearticulate the standpoint of African-American women as a group, Black feminist thinkers offer individual African-American women the conceptual tools to resist oppression.

The cultural context formed by those experiences and ideas that are shared with other members of a group or community which give meaning to individual biographies constitutes a second level at which domination is experienced and resisted. Each individual biography is rooted in several overlapping cultural contexts--for example, groups defined by race, social class, age, gender, religion, and sexual orientation. The cultural component contributes, among other things, the concepts used in thinking and acting, group validation of an individual's interpretation of concepts, the "thought models" used in the acquisition of knowledge, and standards used to evaluate individual thought and behavior. The most cohesive cultural contexts are those with identifiable histories, geographic locations, and social institutions. For Black women African-American communities have provided the location for an Afrocentric group perspective to endure.

Subjugated knowledges, such as a Black women's culture of resistance, develop in cultural contexts controlled by oppressed groups. Dominant groups aim to replace subjugated knowledge with their own specialized thought because they realize that gaining control over this dimension of subordinate groups' lives simplifies control. While efforts to influence this dimension of an oppressed group's experiences can be partially successful, this level is more difficult to control than dominant groups would have us believe. For example, adhering to externally derived standards of beauty leads many African-American women to dislike their skin color or hair texture. Similarly, internalizing Eurocentric gender ideology leads some Black men to abuse Black women. These are cases of the successful infusion of the dominant group's specialized thought into the everyday cultural context of African-Americans. But the long-standing existence of a Black women's culture of resistance as expressed through Black women's relationships with one another, the Black women's blues tradition, and the voices of contemporary African-American women writers all attest to the difficulty of eliminating the cultural context as a fundamental site of resistance.

Domination is also experienced and resisted on the third level of social institutions controlled by the dominant group: namely, schools, churches, the media, and other formal organizations. These institutions expose individuals to the specialized thought representing the dominant group's standpoint and interests. While such institutions offer the promise of both literacy and other skills that can be used for individual empowerment and social transformation, they simultaneously require docility and passivity. Such institutions would have us believe that the theorizing of elites constitutes the whole of theory. The existence of African-American women thinkers such as Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Zora Neale Hurston, and Fannie Lou Hamer who, though excluded from and/or marginalized within such institutions, continued to produce theory effectively opposes this hegemonic view. Moreover, the more recent resurgence of Black feminist thought within these institutions, the case of the outpouring of contemporary Black feminist thought in history and literature, directly challenges the Eurocentric masculinist thought pervading these institutions.

Domination operates by seducing, pressuring, or forcing African-American women and members of subordinated groups to replace individual and cultural ways of knowing with the dominant group's specialized thought. As a result, suggests Audre Lorde, "the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us." Or as Toni Cade Bambara succinctly states, "revolution begins with the self, in the self."

Lorde and Bambara's suppositions raise an important issue for Black feminist intellectuals and for all scholars and activists working for social change. Although most individuals have little difficulty identifying their own victimization within some major system of oppression--whether it be by race, social class, religion, physical ability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, age or gender--they typically fail to see how their thoughts and actions uphold someone else's subordination. Thus white feminists routinely point with confidence to their oppression as women but resist seeing how much their white skin privileges them. African-Americans who possess eloquent analyses of racism often persist in viewing poor white women as symbols of white power. The radical left fares little better. "If only people of color and women could see their true class interests," they argue, "class solidarity would eliminate racism and sexism." In essence, each group identifies the oppression with which it feels most comfortable as being fundamental and classifies all others as being of lesser importance. Oppression is filled with such contradictions because these approaches fail to recognize that a matrix of domination contains few pure victims or oppressors. Each individual derives varying amounts of penalty and privilege from the multiple systems of oppression which frame everyone's lives.

A broader focus stresses the interlocking nature of oppressions that are structured on multiple levels, from the individual to the social structural, and which are part of a larger matrix of domination. Adhering to this inclusive model provides the conceptual space needed for each individual to see that she or he is both a member of multiple dominant groups and a member of multiple subordinate groups. Shifting the analysis to investigating how the matrix of domination is structured along certain axes--race, gender, and class being the axes of investigation for African American women--reveals that different systems of oppression may rely in varying degrees on systemic versus interpersonal mechanisms of domination.

Empowerment involves rejecting the dimensions of knowledge, whether personal, cultural, or institutional, that perpetuate objectification and dehumanization. African-American women and other individuals in subordinate groups become empowered when we understand and use those dimensions of our individual, group, and disciplinary ways of knowing that foster our humanity as fully human subjects. This is the case when Black women value our self-definitions, participate in a Black women's activist tradition, invoke an Afrocentric feminist epistemology as central to our worldview, and view the skills gained in schools as part of a focused education for Black community development. C. Wright Mills identifies this holistic epistemology as the "sociological imagination" and identifies its task and its promise as a way of knowing that enables individuals to grasp the relations between history and biography within society. Using one's standpoint to engage the sociological imagination can empower the individual. "My fullest concentration of energy is available to me," Audre Lorde maintains, "only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restriction of externally imposed definition."

Living life as an African-American woman is a necessary prerequisite for producing Black feminist thought because within Black women's communities thought is validated and produced with reference to a particular set of historical, material, and epistemological conditions. African-American women who adhere to the idea that claims about Black women must be substantiated by Black women's sense of our own experiences and who anchor our knowledge claims in an Afrocentric feminist epistemology have produced a rich tradition of Black feminist thought.

Traditionally such women were blues singers, poets, autobiographers, storytellers, and orators validated by everyday Black women as experts on a Black women's standpoint. Only a few unusual African-American feminist scholars have been able to defy Eurocentric masculinist epistemologies and explicitly embrace an Afrocentric feminist epistemology. Consider Alice Walker's description of Zora Neal Hurston:

In my mind, Zora Neale Hurston, Billie Holiday, and Bessie Smith form a sort of unholy trinity. Zora belongs in the tradition of black women singers, rather than among "the literati." . . . Like Billie and Jessie she followed her own road, believed in her own gods pursued her own dreams, and refused to separate herself from "common" people.

Zora Neal Hurston is an exception for prior to 1950, few African-American women earned advanced degrees and most of those who did complied with Eurocentric masculinist epistemologies. Although these women worked on behalf of Black women, they did so within the confines of pervasive race and gender oppression. Black women scholars were in a position to see the exclusion of African-American women from scholarly discourse, and the thematic content of their work often reflected their interest in examining a Black women's standpoint. However, their tenuous status in academic institutions led them to adhere to Eurocentric masculinist epistemologies so that their work would be accepted as scholarly. As a result, while they produced Black feminist thought, those African-American women most likely to gain academic credentials were often least likely to produce Black feminist thought that used an Afrocentric feminist epistemology.

An ongoing tension exists for Black women as agents of knowledge, a tension rooted in the sometimes conflicting demands of Afrocentricity and feminism. Those Black women who are feminists are critical of how Black culture and many of its traditions oppress women. For example, the strong pronatal beliefs in African-American communities that foster early motherhood among adolescent girls, the lack of self-actualization that can accompany the double-day of paid employment and work in the home, and the emotional and physical abuse that many Black women experience from their fathers, lovers, and husbands all reflect practices opposed by African-American women who are feminists. But these same women may have a parallel desire as members of an oppressed racial group to affirm the value of that same culture and traditions. Thus strong Black mothers appear in Black women's literature, Black women's economic contributions to families is lauded, and a curious silence exists concerning domestic abuse.

As more African-American women earn advanced degrees, the range of Black feminist scholarship is expanding. Increasing numbers of African-American women scholars are explicitly choosing to ground their work in Black women's experiences, and, by doing so, they implicitly adhere to an Afrocentric feminist epistemology. Rather than being restrained by their both/and status of marginality, these women make creative use of their outsider-within status and produce innovative Afrocentric feminist thought. The difficulties these women face lie less in demonstrating that they have mastered white male epistemologies than in resisting the hegemonic nature of these patterns of thought in order to see, value, and use existing alternative Afrocentric feminist ways of knowing.

In establishing the legitimacy of their knowledge claims, Black women scholars who want to develop Afrocentric feminist thought may encounter the often conflicting standards of three key groups. First, Black feminist thought must be validated by ordinary Atrican-American women who, in the words of Hannah Nelson, grow to womanhood "in a world where the saner you are, the madder you are made to appear." To be credible in the eyes of this group, scholars must be personal advocates for their material, be accountable for the consequences of their work, have lived or experienced their material in some fashion, and be willing to engage in dialogues about their findings with ordinary, everyday people. Second, Black feminist thought also must be accepted by the community of Black women scholars. These scholars place varying amounts of importance on rearticulating a Black women's standpoint using an Afrocentric feminist epistemology. Third, Afrocentric feminist thought within academia must be prepared to confront Eurocentric masculinist political and epistemological requirements.

The dilemma facing Black women scholars engaged in creating Black feminist thought is that a knowledge claim that meets the criteria of adequacy for one group and thus is judged to be an acceptable knowledge claim may not be translatable into the terms of a different group. Using the example of Black English, June Jordan illustrates the difficulty of moving among epistemologies:

You cannot "translate" instances of Standard English preoccupied with abstraction or with nothing/nobody evidently alive into Black English. That would warp the language into uses antithetical to the guiding perspective of its community of users. Rather you must first change those Standard English sentences, themselves, into ideas consistent with the person-centered assumptions of Black English.

Although both worldviews share a common vocabulary, the ideas themselves defy direct translation.

For Black women who are agents of knowledge, the marginality that accompanies outsider-within status can be the source of both frustration and creativity. In an attempt to minimize the differences between the cultural context of African-American communities and the expectations of social institutions, some women dichotomize their behavior and become two different people. Over time, the strain of doing this can be enormous. Others reject their cultural context and work against their own best interests by enforcing the dominant group's specialized thought. Still others manage to inhabit both contexts but do so critically, using their outsider-within perspectives as a source of insights and ideas. But while outsiders within can make substantial personal cost. "Eventually it comes to you," observes Lorraine Hansberry, "the thing that makes you exceptional, if you are at all, is inevitably that which must also make you lonely."

Once Black feminist scholars face the notion that, on certain dimensions of a Black women's standpoint, it may be fruitless to try and translate ideas from an Afrocentric feminist epistemology into a Eurocentric masculinist framework, then other choices emerge. Rather than trying to uncover universal knowledge claims that can withstand the translation from one epistemology to another (initially, at least), Black women intellectuals might find efforts to rearticulate a Black women's standpoint especially fruitful. Rearticulating a Black women's standpoint refashions the concrete and reveals the more universal human dimensions of Black women's everyday lives. "I date all my work," notes Nikki Giovanni, "because I think poetry, or any writing, is but a reflection of the moment. The universal comes from the particular." Bell Hooks maintains, "my goal as a feminist thinker and theorist is to take that abstraction and articulate it in a language that renders it accessible--not less complex or rigorous--but simply more accessible." The complexity exists; interpreting it remains the unfulfilled challenge for Black women intellectuals.

"My life seems to be an increasing revelation of the intimate trace of universal struggle," claims June Jordan:

You begin with your family and the kids on the block, and next you open your eyes to what you call your people and that leads you into land reform into Black English into Angola leads you back to your own bed where you lie by yourself; wondering it you deserve to be peaceful, or trusted or desired or left to the freedom of your own unfaltering heart. And the scale shrinks to the use of a skull: your own interior cage.

Lorraine Hansberry expresses a similar idea: "I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from the truthful identity of what is." Jordan and Hansberry's insights that universal struggle and truth may wear a particularistic, intimate face suggest a new epistemological stance concerning how we negotiate competing knowledge claims and identify "truth."

The context in which African-American women's ideas are nurtured or suppressed matters. Understanding the content and epistemology of Black women's ideas as specialized knowledge requires attending to the context from which those ideas emerge. While produced by individuals, Black feminist thought as situated knowledge is embedded in the communities in which African-American women find ourselves.

A Black women's standpoint and those of other oppressed groups is not only embedded in a context but exists in a situation characterized by domination. Because Black women's ideas have been suppressed, this suppression has stimulated African-American women to create knowledge that empowers people to resist domination. Thus Afrocentric feminist thought represents a subjugated knowledge. A Black women's standpoint may provide a preferred stance from which to view the matrix of domination because, in principle, Black feminist thought as specialized thought is less likely than the specialized knowledge produced by dominant groups to deny the connection between ideas and the vested interests of their creators. However, Black feminist thought as subjugated knowledge is not exempt from critical analysis, because subjugation is not grounds for an epistemology.

Despite African-American women's potential power to reveal new insights about the matrix of domination, a Black women's standpoint is only one angle of vision. Thus Black feminist thought represents a partial perspective. The overarching matrix of domination houses multiple groups, each with varying experiences with penalty and privilege that produce corresponding partial perspectives, situated knowledges, and, for clearly identifiable subordinate groups, subjugated knowledges. No one group has a clear angle of vision. No one group possesses the theory or methodology that allows it to discover the absolute "truth" or, worse yet, proclaim its theories and methodologies as the universal norm evaluating other groups' experiences. Given that groups are unequal in power in making themselves heard, dominant groups have a vested interest in suppressing the knowledge produced by subordinate groups. Given the existence of multiple and competing knowledge claims to "truth" produced by groups with partial perspectives, what epistemological approach offers the most promise?

Western social and political thought contains two alternative approaches to ascertaining "truth." The first, reflected in positivist science, has long claimed that absolute truths exist and that the task of scholarship is to develop objective, unbiased tools of science to measure these truths. . . . Relativism, the second approach, has been forwarded as the antithesis of and inevitable outcome of rejecting a positivist science. From a relativist perspective all groups produce specialized thought and each group's thought is equally valid. No group can claim to have a better interpretation of the "truth" than another. In a sense, relativism represents the opposite of scientific ideologies of objectivity. As epistemological stances, both positivist science and relativism minimize the importance of specific location in influencing a group's knowledge claims, the power inequities among groups that produce subjugated knowledges, and the strengths and limitations of partial perspective.

The existence of Black feminist thought suggests another alternative to the ostensibly objective norms of science and to relativism's claims that groups with competing knowledge claims are equal. . . . This approach to Afrocentric feminist thought allows African-American women to bring a Black women's standpoint to larger epistemological dialogues concerning the nature of the matrix of domination. Eventually such dialogues may get us to a point at which, claims Elsa Barkley Brown, "all people can learn to center in another experience, validate it, and judge it by its own standards without need of comparison or need to adopt that framework as their own." In such dialogues, "one has no need to 'decenter' anyone in order to center someone else; one has only to constantly, appropriately, 'pivot the center.' "

Those ideas that are validated as true by African-American women, African-American men, Latina lesbians, Asian-American women, Puerto Rican men, and other groups with distinctive standpoints, with each group using the epistemological approaches growing from its unique standpoint, thus become the most "objective" truths. Each group speaks from its own standpoint and shares its own partial, situated knowledge. But because each group perceives its own truth as partial, its knowledge is unfinished. Each group becomes better able to consider other groups' standpoints without relinquishing the uniqueness of its own standpoint or suppressing other groups' partial perspectives. "What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life," maintains Alice Walker, "is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one's glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity." Partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard; individuals and groups forwarding knowledge claims without owning their position are deemed less credible than those who do.

Dialogue is critical to the success of this epistemological approach, the type of dialogue long extant in the Afrocentric call-and-response tradition whereby power dynamics are fluid, everyone has a voice, but everyone must listen and respond to other voices in order to be allowed to remain in the community. Sharing a common cause fosters dialogue and encourages groups to transcend their differences. . . .

African-American women have been victimized by race, gender, and class oppression. But portraying Black women solely as passive, unfortunate recipients of racial and sexual abuse stifles notions that Black women can actively work to change our circumstances and bring about changes in our lives. Similarly, presenting African-American women solely as heroic figures who easily engage in resisting oppression on all fronts minimizes the very real costs of oppression and can foster the perception that Black women need no help because we can "take it."

Black feminist thought's emphasis on the ongoing interplay between Black women's oppression and Black women's activism presents the matrix of domination as responsive to human agency. Such thought views the world as a dynamic place where the goal is not merely to survive or to fit in or to cope; rather, it becomes a place where we feel ownership and accountability. The existence of Afrocentric feminist thought suggests that there is always choice, and power to act, no matter how bleak the situation may appear to be. Viewing the world as one in the making raises the issue of individual responsibility for bringing about change. It also shows that while individual empowerment is key, only collective action can effectively generate lasting social transformation of political and economic institutions.

About Me

I’m an “non-traditional” 2nd time undergraduate in anthropology, a House-wife, & freelance marketer/fundraiser for non-profits. I’m also the current Communications Officer for the National Association of Student Anthropologists.

My previous academic qualifications are in Art History (Bachelors), Theater (Masters), Early Childhood Education and Political Science minoring in Music & Journalism.

I support people solutions that make statistical and scientific sense. I believe we can solve these problems without having to go broke if we get creative and stop bickering over petty personal differences. I also support equal rights for my fellow LGBT’s and others who are bullied or discriminated against.

My blog is a place for me to converse about these topics and even post a poem or recipe now & again

Quotes

“There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.”

- Albert Einstein

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

- Margaret Mead

"Ignorance is servitude, because as a man thinks, so he is; a man who does not think for himself and allowed himself to be guided by the thought of another is like the beast led by a halter"

- José Protasio Rizal

“How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children”

- Charles Darwin

"Passion, it lies in all of us, sleeping, waiting, and though unwanted, unbidden, it will stir - open its jaws and howl. It speaks to us, guides us, passion rules us all, and we obey! What other choice do we have? Passion is the source of our finest moments. The joy of love... the clarity of hatred... and the ecstasy of grief. It hurts sometimes more than we can bear. If we could live without passion maybe we'd know some kind of peace... but we would be hollow... Empty rooms shuttered and dank. Without passion we'd be truly dead."

- Joss Whedon

"As we grow older we learn. I don’t want to say that I’m wiser than I was, but maybe I’m less stupid … but I will say that I was purposefully blind for a long time. People today are very dismissive of anything they don’t agree with and they listen to people and new sources with the same point of view. I did that … and now I don’t. It’s an evolution."